Facebook users will also be able to chose to approve or reject any photo they are tagged in before it goes live. Photograph: AP

Facebook has moved to address one of its biggest privacy challenges by finally giving users more control over photos tagged and shared on their profile.

Facebook users could previously be tagged in any pictures uploaded by their friends to the biggest photo-sharing site on the web, which hosts an estimated 100bn photos.

Acknowledging one of the most common requests from users, one of a new swath of feature improvements being rolled out by the site in the next few days a new drop-down menu will now allow users to request their friend remove the photo or even block that friend. Users will also be able to chose to approve or reject any photo they are tagged in before it goes live.

Two further changes will be seen as responses to Twitter and Google's surging social networking tool, Google+.

Facebook's status updates will now include an option to add a location, link to other users mentioned in the post – both features that will be familiar to Twitter users – and chose whether the post is shared with friends or the wider public.

In a nod to the popularity of "circles" in Google+, which allow users to group contact, family and friends and set an appropriate level of content sharing, Facebook has said its new sharing option will eventually be expanded so that users can decide whether to share individual posts, links and photos with specific sets of friends.

"This dropdown menu will be expanding over time to include smaller groups of people you may want to share with, like co-workers, friend lists you've created, and groups you're a member of," said Facebook's vice president of product, Chris Cox, in a blog post. "These will make it easy to quickly select exactly the audience you want for any post."

These improvements mark a change in tactic for Facebook, which has regularly aggravated users with its rapid development policy, rolling out new features with no warning. Several of these have sparked concerns over the site's attitude to privacy, including the introduction of the now standard news feed in 2006 which shared users' activity with friends, and the Facebook Beacon feature which displayed users' commercial activity.

Cox insisted Facebook had "done a better job" of consulting privacy advocacy groups and studying privacy controls before introducing the features. Six months in development, they also include moving much of the privacy and sharing settings on to pages and posts themselves to make them more accessible.

New features will also allow users to tag other users that are not friends, though they will need to approve that photo before it goes live, and the sharing option for "everyone" has now been renamed "public".

"This won't be the last iteration of our privacy settings," said Cox. "We're always trying to improve, always doing user testing and always feeding in to improve the controls on who can see content."

Cox rejected comparisons with Google+ and Twitter. "People will always talk about Google no matter what we do and that's fine – we're not using Google to determine the work we do. As for Twitter – it's a pretty different service and I'm not sure how they will respond. We just want people to be clear on the differences between sharing behaviours."

The changes will also mean that the opt-in "Places" feature on Facebook's mobile app, which had caused some controversy among users concerned about sharing their location, is phased out. Instead, users can chose to add their location to status updates they post.

"Location is not about checking in," said Cox. "Places was rather a monolithic feature, but we've taken that to the sharing tool and made it one common flow."